by
Sherry Lutz Zivley

November 23, 2009

Wind and Madness in Literature and Domestic Art That the combination of the isolation and the dust storms of West Texas can drive people crazy is demonstrated both in women's fiction and in their domestic arts. Dorothy Scarborough's novel, The Wind and Victor Sjöström's silent film (based on Scarborough's novel and staring Lillian Gish) depict a young woman's descent into madness as a result of moving from a comfortable life in Virginia to the isolation, hardships, and terrible windstorms of West Texas.
The International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas, in 1986 featured Texas quilts. Some quilts that were made by women living in isolation in West Texas around 1900 display symptoms of madness similar to the madness depicted in The Wind.

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I
grew up in Dallas during a period in which we never experienced a dust
storm. We had blue northers (fronts which approached rapidly from
the north or northwest and which brought strong. dark blue-grey winds
and radical drops in temperature). For me blue northers were never
threats but merely harbingers of gingerbread and cocoa in front of the
fireplace. Only later, when I lived for two years in Las Cruces,
New Mexico, did I learn about dust storms that pitted or completely
removed paint from cars and first frazzled your nerves, then gradually
drove you crazy. Consequently I recognized the emotional truths
that are depicted in Dorothy Scarborough’s novel The Wind[ii] and the 1927
silent film based on the novel (directed by Victor Seastrom and
starring Lillian Gish) and in some quilts made by West Texas pioneer
women.

Hurricanes have frequently been used in fiction and film to emphasize
plots in which innocent people fall victim to the violence of criminals
or psychotics, for example in Key Largo, Cape Fear, and
The Mean Season. In contrast, powerful winds, such as the
mistrals of Provence, France; the soroccos of northern Africa; and the
mariahs of Montana and the western United States[iii] are often associated
with mental turmoil or even madness.

The
dust storms and blue northers of West Texas, according to Barbara
Quissell, “are comparable to the mistral of southern France and the
sirocco of northern Africa, other violent winds which are said to drive
individuals to extreme and uncharacteristic actions."[iv] As Joe R.
Eagleman[v] points
out, “continued drought can change the landscape.... The dust
storms of the l930s covered fences with mounds of dust; a dust storm
500 km in diameter can carry 100 million tons of dust.” Likewise,
a “norther may reach a speed of 40 knots, and...[can] produce[ ]
clouds of dust.”[vi] Although in this century the dust storms that
produced the dust bowl and contributed to the Great Depression are well
known, the winds and dust storms of the West Texas drought of
l885-86—the period in which The Wind was set—were far
more severe. Scarborough’s representations of the wind in her
novel are not exaggerated. As Carole Slade points out, “Numerous
types of destructive winds, including cyclones, tornadoes, and
northers… did continually threaten the lives and property of pioneers
on unprotected Texas ranges” (86). Eagleman explains that
in an “intense longwave cyclone. . . strong winds [can]
pick up considerable dust from the dry soil in eastern Colorado, New
Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas” (34) and can create
extreme–nightlike–darkness (35).

The
blue northers of Texas, which Karolyn Bresenham and Puentes
describe in Lone Stars: A Legend of Texas Quilts,
1836-1936, sometimes bring in “enough cold air to drop the
temperature from 90o to 30o in less than an hour.”[vii] These northers
get their name not only from their temperature but also because of “the
dark blue haze [that is] created by the advancing cold current against
the warmer southern wind” Texas Almanac: 1958-1959,
163). The storm can be darker still if it has picked up
dust. In Scarborough's novel, Letty describes one blue norther
that begins as “ a puny, cloud, slight and fragile, touching the
prairie’s rim,” but which “grew and darkened. Swiftly it spread
over the sky until it blotted out the blue, till it hung, a black pall,
over the wide heavens. It happened so quickly...that Letty
could scarcely believe it” (171). She describes “the icy chill of
a sudden (171) drop in temperature” and explains that “night was on
them almost immediately, for the clouds had blotted out the daylight,
wiping out even the [usual] brief wintry dusk” (172).

Scarborough’s novel, The Wind, shows the effect that the
hardships of pioneer homesteading had on women, most of whom came from
places whose landscape and weather were benign or even luxurious.
Scarborough’s novel demonstrates the erosion that the combination of
wind and isolation can cause to a person’s sanity. In the course
of the novel, Letty is orphaned at eighteen with no relatives to take
care of her in her native Virginia. She is persuaded by her pastor to
travel to Sweetwater, Texas to live with her cousin, who is a rancher
there. As the train carries her westward, she becomes more and
more depressed by the landscape—by its desiccation, by its emptiness,
by the skeletons of dead cattle she sees along the way, and most of
all, by its fierce winds. The wind drives her first to marry a
man she cannot love; second, to have an affair with a man she cannot
trust; third, to murder him with a typical West Texas weapon—a rifle;
fourth, to bury him only to have his body gradually unearthed by the
wind; and finally, to go completely mad and rush out across the prairie
in a windstorm to her death.

Of
the very few critics who have discussed The Wind, two utilize
feminist viewpoints. Barbara(?) Quissel presents a brief biography of
Scarborough, focuses on the realism and historical accuracy of the
novel’s presentation of the Western pioneer experience, and argues that
the “feminist viewpoint [of the novel] is a secondary theme” (187). She
compares the novel with the 1927 Victor Seastrom silent film, and
considers the significance of the fact that the point of view is that
of “the interior mind” (191). Carol Slade argues that the wind in the
novel represents a patriarchal society; she interprets the powerful and
pervasive wind as a symbol of “the masculine force . . .
[that] can incapacitate a woman for authorship” (Slade 86).[viii]

Certainly Scarborough distinguishes between men’s and women’s ability
to deal with the wind: Gram’ma Powers explains to Letty that the wind
is “the hardest thing a woman is up against on the plains. Men
don’t know what it means to us. Their nerves ain’t like ourn”
(194). In Scarborough’s introduction to the novel she says, “The
winds were cruel to women that came under their tyranny. They
were at them ceaselessly, buffeting them with icy blasts in winter,
parching their skins and roughening their hair, and trying to wear down
their nerves by attrition, and drive them away” (3).

As
an extremely sensitive eighteen-year-old, Letty is vulnerable to
suggestions and predisposed to internalize what Roddy, the stranger she
meets on the train to Sweetwater, tells her. He states that “the
wind is the worse thing,” and that “it’s ruination to a woman's
looks and nerves pretty often. It dries up her skin till it gets
brown and tough as leather. It near 'bout puts her eyes out with
the sand it blows in 'em all day. It gets on her nerves with its
constant blowing—makes her irritable and jumpy” (21). (I
might have thought this description excessive had I not experienced
West Texas dust storms, seen that the wind could in a few hours remove
all the paint from the side of a car facing the wind, and experienced
the way that the wind first made people uneasy, but could in a couple
of days make them feel extremely anxious—almost crazy.) He also
tells her how dangerous tornadoes are. Roddy also plants the idea that
will encompass Letty: that the wind is “a devil” (24). She immediately
assimilates these ideas, conceiving of the wind as “a terror that might
pass by day or night, to leave death and devastation in its path!
It the day, when you could see its frightfulness,–or in the night when
you could only hear it roaring, and imagine!” (26). When she
detrains in Sweetwater she feels that “the wind swooped at her like a
mad malevolence” (37) and admits that “the wind got on my nerves”
(44). Instead of recognizing the beauty in seeing
“incredible distances in all directions(?),” she “feels queer to be out
in the open with so much space about” (53). She is also
susceptible to Lige Hightower’s assertion that “I reckon there are
folks that’d go loco for lonesomeness” (54).

Letty becomes obsessed with what she considers the “demonic wind”
(105), a wind that “roared like a thousand demons let loose from the
pit” (172). She personifies the wind as “a demon steed,
racing like a black shadow across the plain, a lonely, terrible figure,
neighing in the night” (155), and believes it is determined to destroy
her. She intensifies her fear by incanting again and again a song she
had learned in Virginia: “Lord, I don’t want to die in a storm”
(156). She begins to think in the kind of teleological
causality that schizophrenics use, i.e., they believe that “every act,
every event occurs because it is willed or wanted either by [a]
person…or by something that has become personified” (Atieti 241)–in
Letty’s case, the wind. Arieti even states, “If a storm occurs,
if the wind blows it is solely because someone wants it to (242,
italics Arieti’s).

Letty not only blames all her suffering on the malevolent wind, but
develops irrational beliefs about it that gradually become obsessive
hallucinations. She believes:

the wind was a demon that had driven them all crazy; that had put false
thoughts in Cora’s [her cousin’s wife, who hated Letty] mind, making
her stir up…trouble….. The wind was determined to destroy
her, because she feared it so! It was after her, and she couldn’t
escape it!

She saw the wind as a black stallion with mane a-stream, and hoofs of
fire, speeding across the trackless plains, deathless, defiant!...A phantom, riderless horse, whom
no mortal would ever ride–that no lariat flung by human hands could
capture! His proud neck arching, his eyes glancing flames, he
raced toward her across the sand—supernatural, satanic, the wind of the
North! (175)

At a later point in the novel she describes the wind differently, as

“whirling curtains of dust, veils that writhed and twisted, hung like
cloth of gold from the heavens, as high as she could see. The
wind was no longer naked and invisible. It had clothed itself
with those swirling veils that revealed its obscene antics, its
horrific gestures. It was a thing unbearable to see the
wind!" (197, italics Scarborough’s).

Letty believes that “no human being, no wild beast even, could be so
tricky and so crafty and so cruel as the wind and the sand” (198), and
that the wind would “laugh and shriek at you” 199). She believes
that she has angered the wind because she can read the its mind (334),
and that “the wind knew what…[her] thoughts were” (335).

Letty demonstrates a major symptom of schizophrenia, adualism, which
Arieti defines as “[the] lack of the ability to distinguish between the
two realities, that of the mind and that of the external world” (Arieti
278). The fact that she says that she “held long dialogues with
persons imagined or actual” (208), and that she imagines mirages of
“green trees and still lakes” (260) shows that she can no longer
distinguish between a hallucination and the real, a major symptom of
schizophrenia, according to Arieti. She also demonstrates another
symptom of schizophrenia, “an increased acuity of perception” (Arieti
279), as she becomes “acutely aware of all that went on around her”
(Scarborough 261). Her observations match Arieti’s analysis, that
“in many . . . cases of acute schizophrenia the
patient experiences an increased acuity of perception” (Arieti
279).

Letty also experiences another basic symptom of schizophrenia, a sense
of separation and alienation from his or her own body.
Emotionally healthy persons usually feel their bodies to be “alive,
real, and substantial." and feel themselves to be "alive, real, and
substantial" (Laing 68). They perceive themselves as "embodied"
(Laing 68). In contrast, schizophrenics experience themselves as
"unembodied" (Laing 68). Unlike "those 'ordinary' people who feel
in moments of stress partially dissociated from their bodies,"
they "go through life...detached from their bodies" (Laing
68). To them, "the body is felt more as one object among other
objects in the world" or as "a false self which a detached,
disembodied, 'inner,' 'true' self looks on...with tenderness,
amusement, or hatred."

Letty experiences “a queer remoteness from reality, as if only her body
were there, and she herself were far away” (181). She also
exhibits symptoms of bipolar illness in that she alternatively
experiences “despondency so profound that it seemed she could never
climb up to spiritual peace” and moments of “unreasonable exhilaration”
in which her “spirit would walk on rainbow clouds, [and] her whole body
would tingle with joy.” These mood swings suggest
that she may also be suffering from bi-polar illness.

At the novel’s climax and conclusion, after she has murdered Wirt Roddy
and buried him, unsuccessfully,

because the wind blew away the sand that covered his body, the final
words of the novel are

“with a laugh that strangled on a scream, the woman sped to the
door, flung it open and rushed out. She fled across the prairies
like a leaf blown in a gale, borne along in the force of the wind that
was at last to have its way with her” (337).

At this point, having allowed herself to be driven completely mad by
the wind, Letty goes out into the storm and to her death.

Certainly the living conditions, deprivations and hardships which
Scarborough describes throughout her novel were no exaggeration.
Bresenham explains that “Farms and ranches were . . sometimes more than
a day’s rid from civilization” (19), and “their lives were...reduced to the bare essentials of their environment–the rattlesnake,
the Texas son, the windmill, the log cabin, the schoolhouse”
(1836-1936, 17). Likewise, the women who lived “in the
Panhandle or the plains [ ] watched the Dust Bowl [of the 1930’s]blow
away the hopes and dreams that lay in the topsoil the wind swept away
into black clouds as high as mountains” (1936-1986, 11),
just as it had during previous droughts. A pioneer woman had to
try to make a home, as did Letty, in a log cabin that was “just a
box-house . . . [s]et up in makeshift fashion with a rock
at each corner, and an occasional one along the walls,” in a yard
with “no flowers, no grass” (182) and whose interior walls were papered
with newspapers ( 190). And some had to live in dugouts.
MaryTaylor Bunton, . in Texas Tears and Texas
Sunshine,[ix][x]
exclaims, “Can you . . . imagine people living in dirt
houses? That was what a ‘dugout’ was–just a good-sized square
hole dug back into the south side of a hill . . .
. There were no windows in the dugout and only a dirt
floor. In times of storm a wagon sheet or tarpaulin was fastened
across the doorway” (230). Nevertheless, the women quilted.
And although Thomas K. Woodard and Blanche Greenstein explain, writing
fifty years later, that “quilting gave women a profound sense of
accomplishment, of being able to do something at a time
when the laber force was idle and to piece something
together when many people’s lives were falling apart” (35), an
anonymous woman who lived through the Great Depression puts it more
bluntly: “Lady, we didn’t have no money. Nobody had no
money. All we had was time. People made them quilts because
there wasn’t nothing else to do!” (Quoted in 1936-1986, 29),
they quilted because they had to live by the saying, “Use it up, wear
it out, make it do, or do without” (1836-1936, 19).

In
l984, the International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas, featured an
enormous number of Texas quilts, some of which were later described in
Bresenham and Puentes‘s Lone Stars: A Legend of Texas Quilts,
1836-1936, and its companion volume, which covers the years
1936-1986. Most of the
quilts in this quilt show were traditional with serene and comforting
designs. Such quilts usually have formal balance, use
either pastel or primary or secondary colors, and are usually serene,
happy. Two examples are the following. Below, on the left,
is a design called “flower garden.” On the right is traditional
appliquéd desigh, which usually showed flowers and/or vines.

At that 1984 quilt show I was stunned by a half a dozen or so quilts
that instantly struck me as psychotic. Most of them were from the
l9th century, made by women who had followed their husbands from the
East Coast to the hardships of life of West Texas homesteading. These
very untraditional quilts by West Texas women unnerved me because they
seemed crazy, truly psychotic. Unlike what are called
"crazy quilts," which are artfully designed, elaborately embroidered,
constructed of silk and velvet. Traditional crazy quilts were
intended to show the elaborate stichery of their creators and were used
not for keeping warm in bed but for display in parlors—often as lap
quilts.

Unlike crazy quilts, which are not crazy at all, some of these West
Texas quilts were. I think even the photographs of them are
troubling to look at, and to confront them in their full size was even
more unsettling. They gave the impression that the minds that
conceived them must be very troubled indeed. Each of the
following pages shows a troubling West Texas quilt from the turn of the
century.

Quilt #1

The
severity of the black and white Carpenter's Square Quilt (Quilt
#1)[xi] suggests
a very stark, colorless, but painfully overly-controlled view of the
world. The desigh is neither a labyrinth (in which one can only
follow one path from entrance to exit) nor a maze (in which one can
easily get lost but out of which one can eventually find one's way),
but a series of crisscrossing, concentric, right-angled figures in any
one of which one would be permanently imprisoned. Both the
starkness of the lack of color and the encapsulating design seems to
represent an inflexible world, a world of severely limited
possibilities, almost a world of incarceration such as that which women
like Letty in Scarborough's novel experienced daily.

The
next two quilts are of a type called “postage stamp quilts,” which
means they are made from individual pieces that are no larger than
postage stamp.. In both cases, because the pieces are triangular,
they are the size of half postage stamps. Although most postage
stamp quilts seem quite orderly, these do not.

Quilt #2

Quilt #2[xii] is
constructed of tiny triangles, often grouped as six-pointed
stars. Although the quilt seems to tend toward some overall
design, everywhere there are violations of that design. The quilt's
movement is never resolved at any focal point or in any overall
pattern. The quilt conveys a troubling confusion to the viewer
and implies a similar confusion in the quilt maker.

Quilt #3

The other postage stamp quilt (Quilt #3),[xiii] constructed of
thousands of triangles, has a clearly planned design. Yet the
design, with its wavelike pattern, which seems, like op-art, to be in
constant (op-art-like) ever-changing, rippling motion, makes a viewer
feel dizzy and almost seasick. And, if looking at these quilts
for just a few minutes is unsettling to the viewer, how much more
unsettling it must have been for the quilt makers to look at them for
the length of time it would have taken to construct them.

The following three quilts are of a type usually called "target quilts"
and convey the same implicit threat that is suggested by Jasper John's
target paintings.

Quilt #4

Quilt #4 (circa 1900) is clearly a target with a bull's eye that is
surrounded by concentric circles which emphasizes the center of the
target. Quilt #4[xiv] unnerved me, and I said to myself, “It’s the evil
eye.” Then before I uttered my reactions to the quilts,
the Turkish woman I was attending the show with, exclaimed, “My God,
its the evil eye!” Silvano Areiti has said that the art of
schizophrenic patients often represented “the evil eye” that
schizophrenics believe is watching them. [xv] Arieti explains,

The eye symbolizes the world, or the other, any person other than
yourself, the other...who is there not to commune with you but to
watch. And to watch means to scrutinize, to blame, to condemn, to
reject you an to destroy your sense of self-regard, your privacy, and
your human dignity. (358)

Such perceptions are like Hetty’s conviction that the wind watches her,
knows her thoughts, and is out to destroy her.

Quilt #5

Quilt #5 (circa 1890-1900) is made of concentric octagons around the
eye center, which suggest an unbearable excess of pain.
Furthermore, these quilts are dominated by the vivid colors: reds
(muted in the photograph), blacks, and whites—the visually assaulting
colors of the German Expressionists and of Sylvia Plath's most
psychotic poetry.

Quilt #6

In Quilt #6 (circa 1910) the red bull's eyes or evil eyes
seem to have multiplied, out of control, much as did the water-carrying
broom of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" or the increasing number of
creeping women the speaker in "The Yellow Wallpaper"
hallucinates. The result is that quilt presents a multiplicity of
evil eyes—eyes that seem to be watching one from a variety of vantage
points.

Quilt #7

Quilt #7,[xvi]
does not assault the reader with either loud colors, irregularity, or
concentric design, but, nevertheless, I think creates anxiety.
Its somewhat uneasy circular designs have harsh, serrated edges, the
quilt’s colors are dull and muted, have little contrast, and, in fact,
are rather ugly. Only when one reads its title, “Rattlesnakes”
does one fully understand its deadly threat of multiple and perhaps
multiplying rattlesnakes.

Quilt #8

Quilt #8 is, perhaps, the strangest of them all. The use of the
colors red, white, and blue seem upbeat, patriotic, happy. But
the extreme irregularity of the patterns are
self-contradictory. That what appear the dominant forms, the
eight-pointed stars are of a variety of colors—a few reds, whites, and
blues, but are predominantly of muted, greyed colors is strange.
That the quite had two full-circle starts, two that are half-circiles,
and not quite half circles is strange. The two swastika-like
red-white and blue patters are made of identical squares, but that all
the other red, white, and blue squares are cut into random patterns
make for a whole that is painfully at odds with itself. There is
no focal point at which the viewers eye can settle, and the whole
effect is like the optical illusions that are made to shift as one
looks at them.

All
of these quilts are extremely troubling, especially when one realizes
how long their creators would have had to look at them during their
piecing and quilting. These quilts are a far cry from most
American quilts, whose order and serenity suggest the safety, security,
satisfaction, and sanity of a comfortable and happy American
home. These turn of the century West Texas quilts communicate the

the agony and loneliness of the isolated women pioneers who created
them

I
have experienced the degree to which a West Texas windstorm’s
intensity, lastingness, physical and mental abrasiveness, and apparent
malevolence can effect a person emotionally. Scarborough
certainly demonstrates that the wind can drive a lonely woman
mad. And various quilts by Texas pioneer women suggest the degree
to which the isolation and winds and isolation of Texas had troubled
them.

[i]What Kesey
says about the fictional Wakonda, Oregon is equally true of West
Texas, especially in the era when it was being settled by pioneers
and cattlemen, separated from their nearest neighbor by
many miles.

12The Carpenter's Square Quilt was made around
1895 by Marth Harrient Kincaid Wilson in McKinney, Colin County,
Texas.

13This triangle postage stamp quilt was
pieced around 1890. Although dates are available for this and
the following quilts, complete documentation is temporarily
unavailable, but is recorded in the Texas Quilt Archives and will
eventually be available.

14This triangle postage stamp with a wavy
pattern was pieced between 1890 and 1900.

15This target quilt was pieced around 1900.

16 I was familiar with Arieti’s explanations of the symptoms of
schizophrenia because I had been doing a series of essays of the
schizophrenic symptoms demonstrated by the women who are the
speakers in the poetry of Sylvia Plath.